| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5] > | Hourly rates like any other industry service Thread poster: Maria-da-Fé Albuquerque
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Samuel Murray wrote:
Good examples
Even if it’s your own TM, it will also contain errors and terms that have changed and things you now want to put differently for various reasons.
And if it’s not your own TM, it will also be riddled with inconsistencies.
I would never, ever, ever blindly trust a 100% match. Everything needs to be checked, always.
And all work should be paid for.
Which takes us neatly back to the merits of hourly rates.
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 10:43
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Samuel Murray wrote:
No, a fuzzy match is a match in which the *source* text is different. A match in which the source text is identical is a repetition.
...aware of that. I thought she was talking about a 95% identical segment, which would be a fuzzy. But apparently I misunderstood that.
Anyway, let's return to my initial statement that caused the fuzz:
Lieven Malaise wrote:
I read a lot of complaints about the reduced payment of repetitions and fuzzies, but in several cases I'm still paid 10% and even 20% for a repetition that costs me no work at all.
It was not my intention to imply that repetitions litterally don't cost time at all. As your exemples show (they also partially apply to Dutch) there are instances in which you have to edit repetitions. However, that need for editing is easily identifiable because if the context changes that causes the need for repetition editing, you have to translate that changed context first. So by the time you arrive at the generated repetition that needs editing you already know it needs editing. In other words, it's a quite natural process. Besides that it's still a fact that the very large majority of repetitions doesn't need any editing (at least not for the texts that I translate).
But for clarity's sake I will rephrase : "but in several cases I'm still paid 10% and even 20% for repetitions that cost me almost no work."
[Edited at 2023-04-26 17:42 GMT]
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 10:43
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
| 100% matches and repetitions are 2 different things | Apr 26, 2023 |
Ice Scream wrote:
I would never, ever, ever blindly trust a 100% match.
100% matches, based on previous translations stored in a translation memory, are different from repetitions within the same text. You are automatically the author of the translation that will be repeated.
It is obvious that you can't trust a 100% match if you are not the author of that translation. By the way, 100% matches mostly occur when you translate new versions of older documents/websites/manuals/..., so the context will mostly be the same. Occurrences in which you have 100% matches between 2 documents that aren't even remotely similar will be very rare and will obviously require to be thoroughly reviewed.
[Edited at 2023-04-26 18:10 GMT]
| | | | Samuel Murray 
Netherlands
Local time: 10:43
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Lieven Malaise wrote: Ice Scream wrote:
I would never, ever, ever blindly trust a 100% match. 100% matches ... are different from repetitions within the same text.
S/he's right, I'm afraid.
Arrgghhhh... sometimes that darn robot is useless!
[Edited at 2023-04-26 18:09 GMT]
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Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 10:43
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
The robot is drunk. 'Lieven' is a male name. But 'Lieve' (without the -n) is a female name. 
| | | | | More examples | Apr 27, 2023 |
Samuel Murray wrote:
Another example from my target language (in the opposite direction) is that while English often have different words for singular and plural, in some cases Afrikaans has just one word. Take "this" vs "these" or "it" vs "them" -- in all four cases the Afrikaans is just "dit". So it becomes important to check the repetition to ensure that the next instance of the sentence follows a sentence that relates to a singular or a plural, otherwise you end up with "these" and "them" used for singular things, and vice versa.
In Greek, the subject of the sentence is often included in the verb, and in the third person the gender has to be inferred from the context. A sentence like "He went down the stairs" would be the same as "She went down the stairs". So it's quite possible to have identical sentences with different translations. To count this as a "100% repetition" would be an insult to the translator, and I prefer not to be insulted by the software I use.
Another example: in Afrikaans, we often do not capitalize after a colon, but in English, capitalization is often used. So if the previous sentence ends on a colon or not will affect whether I need to use a uppercase or lowercase in the Afrikaans, even if the English sentences are identical.
Nitpicking here, but I don't think a colon indicates the end of a sentence in English, and thus a capital letter after it is not needed, and is indeed an error. I know a lot of people put them there nowadays, but what do they know?
| | | | Mr. Satan (X)
English to Indonesian
| Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 10:43
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Philip Lees wrote: Nitpicking here, but I don't think a colon indicates the end of a sentence in English, and thus a capital letter after it is not needed, and is indeed an error. I know a lot of people put them there nowadays, but what do they know?
After a quick Google search there doesn't seem to be a consensus about the use of a capital letter after a colon. Is that correct ?
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Lieven Malaise wrote:
After a quick Google search there doesn't seem to be a consensus about the use of a capital letter after a colon. Is that correct ?
In some cases it's a matter of house editorial style. A lot of medical journals will capitalise the word after a colon in the title of an article. For example, "Safety and efficacy of NewWonderDrug in elderly hypertensives: Latest results from a multicenter trial".
However this is not a sentence, so the stylistic considerations are different. I stand by my statement that a colon does not end a sentence in English, so I wouldn't capitalise the following word unless there was some other reason to do so.
| | | | Lingua 5B
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Local time: 10:43
Member (2009)
English to Croatian
+ ...
I just asked GPT about some unusual names from my country. The kind of unique names some parents “designed” by blending two words or creating a new sound or similar. While unusual, it’ll be immediately clear to a native speaker whether it’s a male or female name based on some word structures. I asked it about three such name and each time it responded “it can be both male and female name”, just because it couldn’t find information about it on Google. So, if it isn’t on Google, it... See more I just asked GPT about some unusual names from my country. The kind of unique names some parents “designed” by blending two words or creating a new sound or similar. While unusual, it’ll be immediately clear to a native speaker whether it’s a male or female name based on some word structures. I asked it about three such name and each time it responded “it can be both male and female name”, just because it couldn’t find information about it on Google. So, if it isn’t on Google, it can’t think.
I also saw AI in providing “a differential diagnosis in medicine with 73% accuracy”. LOL ▲ Collapse
| | | | Kay Denney
France
Local time: 10:43
French to English
Ice Scream wrote: Samuel Murray wrote:
Good examples Even if it’s your own TM, it will also contain errors and terms that have changed and things you now want to put differently for various reasons. And if it’s not your own TM, it will also be riddled with inconsistencies. I would never, ever, ever blindly trust a 100% match. Everything needs to be checked, always. And all work should be paid for. Which takes us neatly back to the merits of hourly rates.
My problem with hourly rates is that I'm pretty fast now! With experience, comes speed. I used to spend ages researching and/or agonising over terminology, now, I simply put what I've always put because it still works. I can earn much more nowadays when charging per-word simply because I no longer need to spend so much time mulling everything over, checking and double-checking.
So I will continue to apply flat fees based loosely on per-word rates that do also factor in the time needed (in that I'll charge more if I know there's something that will probably take longer than usual, if the text is very academic in a field I'm not altogether familiar with, or if the style is very convoluted or if the client seems very disorganised or stressed out).
| | | | | The rates won't be fair. | Apr 27, 2023 |
This would work if agencies would accept the hours the translators worked without pre-determined hourly rates for a particular word count. Some clients assume that one should take an hour to translate 1000 words regardless of the subject matter. So, if your hourly rate is say 25, and per word rate is 0.08. You would lose 55 if you go with the hourly rate.
[Edited at 2023-04-27 12:04 GMT]
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| Hourly rate does not reflect value | Apr 28, 2023 |
You get faster as you become better. You should be paid for the value you add, not for the time you spend. Hourly rates are only beneficial if you are very slow, unless your hourly rate is very high, but then nobody will want to pay you.
[Edited at 2023-04-28 16:16 GMT]
| | | | | Hourly rates are not practical | Apr 30, 2023 |
IMHO, I feel that hourly rates are not practical.
You can claim that it took 5 hours to translate or proofread a certain document where in reality it only took 2.5 hours.
I don't intend to deceive my clients lying to them about how much time it took to finish my job, and for transparency, I would say that charging clients with source words is much easier for both parties how much the whole job would cost. The downside of charging by the hour would be what if the text to be tr... See more IMHO, I feel that hourly rates are not practical.
You can claim that it took 5 hours to translate or proofread a certain document where in reality it only took 2.5 hours.
I don't intend to deceive my clients lying to them about how much time it took to finish my job, and for transparency, I would say that charging clients with source words is much easier for both parties how much the whole job would cost. The downside of charging by the hour would be what if the text to be translated or proofread was written badly where you have a hard time reading and understanding it. It could be double the time you anticipated, but since you already told your client that you could finish the job in 2 hours actually took 4 hours because of the bad text. Maybe you could tell your client about the situation, but you have to go through the hassle of informing them, and maybe they might not agree to your opinion.
As to repetitions and 100% matches, I basically check them even though they are not sometimes paid because in the past, I came across this situation where I was translating a manual for a certain machinery using a CAT tool from German to Japanese. I found out that I cannot overlook them because there was a source segment of the word "Inhalt", which can both mean "naiyo"(contents) and "mokuji"(table of contents) in Japanese. The first time this word Inhalt was on page 3, listing the table of contents of the manual, and later appearing on page 55, where the section described what the contents of the box were, i.e. the machinery itself and some electrical wires and a manual for operating the machinery. But in German, the word "Inhalt" stands for both meaning, and because it was first translated as "table of contents" on page 3 and saved as this meaning, the CAT tool automatically inserted "mokuji" instead of just "naiyo" on page 55 because it is stored that way in the memory.
Since then, I don't blindly trust 100% matches and repetitions, but I try to be careful with them. ▲ Collapse
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The last few objections to hourly rates make no sense to me.
If you’re very productive and do a lot of words per hour, you simply charge more per hour.
If you dishonestly charge more hours than you took, eventually you will be found out and lose your clients.
As I’ve said loads of times before, your client is buying your time, nothing else. A word rate is just an approximation of an hourly rate which some clients find useful.
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